Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt is the original developer of ACE. He is a
Professor at Vanderbilt University, where he studies patterns and
optimizations for distributed real-time and embedded middleware.

Stephen D. Huston is President and CEO of Riverace Corporation, a
provider of technical support and consulting services to companies
who want to keep software projects on track using ACE.

This book describes how the ACE frameworks are designed and how they
can help developers navigate between the limitations of Lower-level
native operating system APIs, which are inflexible and
non-portable, and Higher-level distributed object computing
middleware, which often lacks the efficiency and flexibility to
support networked applications with stringent QoS and portability
requirements. The skills required to produce and use networked
application frameworks have traditionally been locked in the heads of
expert developers or buried deep within the source code of numerous
projects that are spread throughout an enterprise or an industry.
Neither of these locations is ideal, of course, since it's time
consuming and error-prone to re-engineer this knowledge for each new
application or project. To address this problem, this book
illustrates the key patterns that
underlie the structure and functionality of the ACE frameworks. Our
coverage of these patterns also makes it easier to understand the
design and implementation of the open-source ACE toolkit itself.